Buried in a section called “Governing Law” is a little paragraph claiming that future Starlink satellites on Mars will be subject to California state law-the same state where Musk happened to live at the time. In an essay published last year in Volkerrechtsblog, an academic blog about international law, he called out SpaceX founder Elon Musk for sneaking a metaphorical flag into the terms of service for Starlink, his company’s internet service that seeks to connect people around the world by launching and operating 42,000 satellites in orbit. “I’m very opposed to the idea of going and planting flags,” said Adkins. So in 2020 she founded Celestial Citizen, a space media company dedicated to furthering conversations around inclusivity, equity, urban planning and research in space. And far from being victim-free, humanity’s actions in space profoundly impact daily life on Earth-both for better and for worse.Īdkins looked around, and couldn’t find anyone having the kind of discussions about sustainable infrastructure and development in space that she was looking for outside of very niche circles. Far from being lawless, it is a place with a carefully crafted and evolving legal framework. Far from being an empty, ahistorical void, space is chock-full of resources, scientific opportunities, and man-made artifacts-including a rapidly accumulating pile of orbital junk. “The three dominant myths of space governance right now are that there’s no history, no victims, and no law,” Cris van Eijk, a space policy adviser with the International Astronomical Union, told The Daily Beast. In order to avoid repeating our historic mistakes, these scientists and policy makers argue that humans need to take a hard look at the laws we’ve established here on Earth before we boldly go where no person has gone before. Now, with an increasing number of billionaires whipping out spaceships for their own public rocket-measuring contest, a growing movement in the space industry inspired by de-colonialist ideas wants to ensure that places like Mars don’t become the next “New World” for people in power to conquer and trash. “Final frontier” became synonymous with a spirit of space expansion that is deeply, perhaps distressingly, American. When Star Trek debuted in the ’60s and began calling space “the final frontier,” it was in the midst of a geopolitical race to the moon with the Soviet Union. When we gaze into the vast night sky from our terrestrial home, space certainly seems like an overwhelmingly wild and desolate place: an empty plain primed for settlement.
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